We want our money back! (1)

We want our money back

Lets pretend a tightly controlled country was jealous of a much smaller but much richer country.

Their government decided to use their mass of people to out-manufacture the little country. They would need to import the knowledge of how to do it and were very excited that they could organise their hundreds of millions of poor people to work for low wages in appalling conditions for very long hours and in so doing bring untold riches to their country.

So how to do it and to guarantee the continuance of that work.

Of course, they needed to load the dice in their favour but how? The problem was that if the plan is successful then world money markets would naturally adjust the value of their currency. So they rejected the floating exchange rate system the rest of the world use and demanded a fixed rate – just for a time until they got established.

The plan was even more successful than they thought possible in their wildest dreams, in only a few years they:
– became the manufacturing centre of the world causing thousands or even hundreds of thousands of businesses to go broke from Africa to Europe to America
– caused tens of millions of people throughout the world to lose their jobs
– caused an immense imbalances in payments across the world, in so doing brought down the value of their currencies

Then with their massive surplus :
– they started investing in top global firms from Banks to aircraft to airlines to auto and IT companies plus mining companies and shipping.
– They were able to lend America the vast sums they needed, so much
– The excess fuelled the sub-prime housing boom
– This in turn led to the banking crisis of 2008.
– This turn led to the Eurozone collapse.

According to recent research the cumulative drain on the USA exceeds five trillion dollars. With this money China is also building aircraft carriers and it’s military forces, developing a space race. They couldn’t believe their luck.
What can the world do?
We stop buying goods made in China or indeed goods which contain any components made in China.
We don’t need to do it straight-away,
We just need to announce that from six months time, say after Chinese New Year that all retail packaging has to show the phrase “Made in China” in letters not less in size than twenty per cent of the size of the packaging, whether retail, or outers or cartons or shipping and road containers.

We want our money back, we want our manufacturing back, we want our jobs back. Then we don’t mind fighting it out on a level-playing field.

But we still want our five trillion dollars back.

A good start will be to confiscate all China owned assets in America and the rest of the world. Then of course we want an on-going IPR charge for all the inventions they have copied by adding an IPR tax to all their imports, whether complex or simple.

May be China forgot that whilst they have a population of say sixteen hundred million the rest of the world has a population of nearly five billion.